The present invention relates to a system for managing information of a chemical substance, in particular, the present invention relates to a system for estimating the chemical substance included in the parts for compliance with limitation of a specified chemical substance included in the parts, or restriction such as obligation of information transmission relating to the specified chemical substance, and a method for estimating the chemical substance included in the parts.
In recent years, environmental restrictions have been strengthened in each country, and for example, there is RoHS (Restriction of the use of certain Hazardous Substance in electrical and electronic equipment) directive, or REACH (Registration Evaluation Authorization and Restriction of Chemicals) restriction or the like established in Europe. RoHS is a restriction to forbid containment of the specified chemical substance in electrical and electronic equipment, while REACH is a restriction to make obligation of information transmission of the specified chemical substance included in a product. To comply with these restrictions, it is necessary to exchange, without delay, information on the chemical substance included in the parts which each enterprise sells, over the whole supply chain (hereafter referred to as SC). However, in carrying out countermeasure for these restrictions, there is a problem of defectiveness such as error, missing in chemical substance information to be exchanged between enterprises, or tremendous increase in man-hour to confirm this defectiveness, or delay of collecting the chemical substance information, which makes delayed countermeasure to obligation of information transmission to the users.
Under these circumstances, as a method for evaluating containment possibility of a restriction subject material in the parts, there have conventionally been the methods described in the following JP-A-2006-59091 and JP-A-2002-49649 (Patent Document 1 and 2) and the like.
The former method is one for defining a containment possibility rank of the restriction subject material for every material composing the parts, and displaying the containment possibility of these chemical substances in selecting the parts to be purchased. According to this method, it is possible to color mark on the containment possibility rank of the chemical substance such as lead, cadmium specified by RoHS, for each elemental material composing the parts, such as plating, solder, a resin, and display in a matrix. In this way, because of enabling to narrow down an element material with high probability of containing the restriction subject material in inspection thereof, it is possible to countermeasure to the above restrictions efficiently.
In addition, the latter method is one, even in the case of insufficient information on the restriction subject material of a certain parts, for evaluating the chemical substance information in the relevant parts, by averaging processing of the chemical substance information of the same grade or material collected by an existing chemical substance database. According to this method, it is possible to evaluate the chemical substance information included, even for the parts which generate delay in information collection as above, by averaging processing of part chemical substance information of the same grade for electric parts, while by summing up of the average values of chemical substance information of the same material, plating, coating for mechanical parts.